Baseball is our best game for poets, dreamers and falling in love. It's the national Hallmark Card of sports, the province of the romantic mind. We don't care if we ever get back.

The face of baseball love looks like Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, and Fenway Park, where the Reds play Tuesday and Wednesday. It's a winsome face, covered in brick and ivy and buttressed by an iconic green wall. Looks deceive.

When we're finished romanticizing these ballparks – when we're done calling them "shrines'' and "cathedrals'' and such – what we're left with is blocked sightlines, seats made for smaller people, medieval bathrooms, tortuous concession lines and concourses narrower than Scarlett O'Hara's waist.

Fenway and Wrigley work best as concepts. That is, the idea of going to games there can be better than actually following through. In that way, they're a lot like baseball itself. I like the game, more now than ever, but the reality of sitting through three hours of ball-one, ball-two still leaves me a little squirmy.

Is that heresy?

Is it?

People get googly about Fenway and The Friendly Confines. I understand that. I love '57 Chevys, too. That doesn't mean I want to drive one.

Baseball's mythology is such that stadiums are rarely called "stadiums'' anymore, that being too stolid and generic a name for such a pastoral place. (Even if the proprietors of said pastoral place want $200 for a club seat.) They are fields and parks and yards, tra-la-la, so as to better feed the baseball myth.

I'd feel better about loving Fenway and Wrigley if they didn't hawk their charms like a guy selling ties from the trunk of his car. While it is possible, Tuesday and Wednesday, to buy a bleacher seat at Fenway for $20, it's also possible to drop $200 to sit atop the Green Monster. Owing to "dynamic pricing'' – baseball's latest way to separate you from your cash – those Monster seats jump to $600 when the Yankees come to town.

What good is an icon if you can't market it like a bar of deodorant soap?

The rooftops across the street from Wrigley Field used to be lorded over by the folks who actually lived in the apartments below. They were allowed unlimited access, to be shared, as I recall, with a maximum of two friends. In 1989, when the Cubs played the Giants in the playoffs, I stood at the doorway of an apartment building on Waveland Avenue, the left-field side of the rooftop equation, and waited for someone, anyone who lived there. A guy showed up who lived on the second floor. He gave me a tour.

The mind fuzzes some. I recall a two-bedroom place, with a bay window overlooking the field. The view was better than from the red seats at Riverfront Stadium. The guy paid a rent-controlled $700 a month for that apartment, full roof rights included.

That truly was magical, and did baseball's myth proud.

Not any more, amigo. Now, if you want to sit on the roof on Waveland, you get your "corporate group'' together and go to a website that lauds its "low club style seating, sleek, shiny tall tables and over the top artwork.''

Nothing says National Pastime quite like over the top artwork.

The Cubs share revenues from the rooftop seats. They're also wanting to install signage that could block some bodacious views, which has all the rich people threatening lawsuits and rattling their jewelry. The Friendly Confines, indeed.

Ah, but these old places are "quaint,'' doncha know. They don't build 'em like that anymore.

Right, and thank god. Ever go to the bathroom at Wrigley? A word to the uninitiated: Get your shots and ease up on the Old Styles.

Ever look through the real estate ads and come upon a "quaint'' house in a "charming'' neighborhood? Ever buy that place? Ever spend so much time putting contractors' numbers into your cell phone?

In 2014, the average sports fan likes shrines as a concept. In practice, he'd prefer not to pee in a trough, or spend two innings in a beer line or need neck surgery after craning around a support beam for three hours.